The Commonplace Book Project is devoted to creating interactive adventures based on the unfinished story ideas that H.P. Lovecraft collected in his “Commonplace Book”. They’re free for download in exchange for user feedback.

For you whippersnappers who are unfamiliar with the concept of interactive adventures, here’s a Wikipedia entry to help fill you in. Kids today, with your fancy-schmancy graphics and your abundance of CPU cycles. In my day, all we had were a brass lantern and an Elvish sword, and we couldn’t even see them.

Uh, heh. Anyway, Lovecraft. Another excellent example of this type of horror interactive fiction is Infocom’s wonderful The Lurking Horror.

The best part of interactive fiction games is that the text-based play looks entirely innocuous when glanced at by, say, your boss. Try doing that with Halo 3.